A Remedy For Ghosts
by Inaniloquently
Summary: Charlotte and Isabella Swan are sisters separated by circumstance. Bereft, one sister is left behind while the other is lost to a world that neither could have imagined existed. AU with non cannon pairings, set in the Southern Vampire wars. Bella/Jasper.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer

The _Twilight _books and film (and the characters, story lines and ideas related to them) belong to Stephanie Meyer and any other relevant Copy Right owners. This story has not been written for any profit and no infringement is intended.

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**A Remedy For Ghosts**

**Chapter One – Sisters**

_O HOLY SPIRIT of the Hazel, hearken now:_  
_Though shining suns and silver moons burn on the bough,_  
_And though the fruit of stars by many myriads gleam,_  
_Yet in the undergrowth below, still in thy dream,_  
_Lighting the monstrous maze and labyrinthine gloom_  
_Are many gem-winged flowers with gay and delicate bloom._  
_And in the shade, hearken, O Dreamer of the Tree,_  
_One wild-rose blossom of thy spirit breathed on me_  
_With lovely and still light: a little sister flower_  
_To those that whitely on the tall moon-branches tower._  
_Lord of the Hazel, now, O hearken while I pray._  
_This wild-rose blossom of thy spirit fades away._

_A Prayer - George William Russell_

No one can really know about life until they have really lived it. Mine was a simple one, beginning in essence, if not actuality, with the scandal of my mother's return to her home town. She'd left with an out of town boy and was labelled as a flighty, young girl, and returned as a widow with a small baby in tow.

Funny how a death can replace scandal with respectability in a small town world, or how the High School sweetheart who she'd left behind so eagerly for a better prospect became husband material on her return. A bit of time and two wedding rings later, and I came along. Renee and Charles Swan became the very definition of the average, American family. Bad gossip was laid to rest and good names restored. We only learned later that there was biological significant to my older sister being called Charlotte.

Charles was an attentive husband, clearly besotted with our mother, and a solid family man. He was never the most demonstrative father. Hugs, when given, had to be asked for rather than were offered and tended to be awkward. In his stiff, buttoned up way, he always loved us. I never had reason to doubt that.

Renee was the opposite of Charles, open and giving with her affection but less so with her care and attention. She had everything that a woman of her era was supposed to want, but never managed to find a way to let us be enough. Growing up, we learned that if you wanted to eat something edible, you cooked it yourself. Clean laundry and a filled food cupboard equally were the responsibility of anyone other than Renee.

Renee did her best, but she was more best friend than Mom material. She was a self-centred dreamer by practise but loving by nature. Our unconventional little family had it's ups and downs, but we rubbed along well enough. If we suffered deficiencies growing up, I never dwelt on them. I had Charlotte and she had me; each other was all we ever needed. We were as different as chalk and cheese in both personality and looks but sister soul mates in every way.

We were Isabella and Charlotte Swan, one dark haired one the palest of blond, who walked to school together hand in hand with matching braids, ribbons and school bags. Always together thick as thieves, as Grandma Swan would say with an indulgent smile.

Isabella and Charlotte to everyone, including family and friends, we were Bella and Charlie to each other and only each other. No one else was allowed to use "our" names. A point that Charlie had backed up with her teeth and fists when Mike Newton, Kinder Garden playground nuisance and wannabe bully, had dared to corner me and make a point about calling me Bella one recess. He didn't do it a second time...

As we grew up together our differences became more apparent but we were as close as two sisters could ever be. Charlie was the tiny blond yin to my tall and gangly, non-descriptly brown-haired yang. Charlie loved films and making plans for our adventures when were adults, I liked to have my nose in a book and dreamed about college.

Charlie was the leader and I her willing follower. In search of adventure, she got us into trouble and I bargained, apologised and cajoled our way out of it. She was always front and centre at every occasion, I was always quietly in the background. We were a team. She was like the US Marines, marching into action with bravery and determination. I was the diplomatic core who came around and smoothed over tensions in the aftermath.

Our father's moustache would have fallen out never mind curled if he had really known about more than a fraction of the stuff that we got up to! Like the time that Charlie plotted and carried out the removal of Mr Banner's new and much prized Buick Phaeton from its usual parking space right outside his classroom windows to the centre of town. She achieved all of that mischief without ever having driven a car before.

My small contribution involved returning the keys and left me shaking with fear and paranoid for hours afterward. Charlie's was carried out with a smile, complete confidence in her success and excitement in her eyes. She was practically fearless when roused to action.

That particular escapade had been in response to a public dressing down that Mr Banner had delivered because of the state, or rather lack of, Charlie's homework. Further fuelled by the detention we'd _both_ received when I tried back up her reasons for why the home work hadn't been done – shopping for supplies fail by Renee – at the end of the school day. Mr Banner had not appreciated my efforts to defend my sister.

Not that I wasn't capable of getting myself into trouble with the right reasons and motivation cheer-squading by Charlie. Such as the powdered black indelible dye in the boys' locker room showerheads. Not particularly original idea on my part but Mike Newton totally had it coming that time, too!

Together in all things, we went through school as each other's best friends because neither wanted anyone else. Kinder Garden, junior school and on into High School we stuck together like glue. Through Renee's affair, that the whole town seemed to know about, but Charles never acknowledged. Through the incident when Charles was shot in the line duty and the terror of not knowing if he would survive, and the fact that he drank just little bit too much in the aftermath. Grief and loss over the death of two sets of beloved Grandparents. Through the waning years of the Great Depression, and on into worries about a second war in Europe; we took everything that life and our family could throw at us and came out stronger together.

A year older, Charlie finished High School before me, but we had our plans. She wanted away from the backwater Arizona town that Renee had never managed to escape and had plans for us to have a big life in an even bigger city. New York, Boston or her most researched – Los Angeles so favoured because of her adoration of all things Hollywood. I didn't care where we might end up, only that we went together and that I had options for college.

Small town High School girls with big life dreams needed the means as much as the ambition to make those dreams into something more than just fantasies. So we made plans, thought about building careers, travelling and finding a place to call home.

We needed to save towards our exit strategy, but in our small town, options for jobs were limited. Charlie, considering future training as a nurse, got a job as Nurse's Assistant at the local hospital, and I, well know as the girl with her head perpetually buried in a book, secured a job at the local library at the weekends and around school time.

Life was good. I was busy, focused and content, because in a world were not everything was quite black and white enough for my lacking-in-confidence self, Charlie was my certainty. We were the most absolutely solid thing that we had in our lives and I trusted in us above all things. We were unbreakable.

Until we broke.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two – Stupor

_Softly love and to love softly.  
Dew on the sycamore branch by the creaking gate.  
Where my heart hurries afterward through the path of wheat along the briar, to that stone, under which I lie. _

_Tudors, Season One_

It was eight months after my seventeenth birthday and the month before Charlie's 19th birthday when she disappeared.

No body. No sightings. No traces. Just _gone._

Charlie had planned for us to travel to Phoenix for the weekend with her friend from the hospital, Alison, who was going to visit her parents. Those plans hit a small, Renee shaped problem. I was recovering from a mild stomach bug which Renee also caught. Proclaiming herself to need care to aid her recovery, Renee tried to make one of us stay home. Charlie's protests fell on deaf ears with Renee, and Charles, as ever, backed our mother – insisting that one of us had to stay home. In the end, and despite Charlie's protests, I volunteered to keep the peace.

No one could fault Renee when it came to her single-mindedness regarding her own self interests. I knew how it would end, and didn't want Charlie to miss out on a much anticipated and rare weekend away because of Renee's need for fuss and attention.

So, our father drove a grumbling Charlie to the bus station with her friend Alison. She never returned. I don't think I will ever be able to forgive myself for that. We should have been together, like always. By being good, biddable, keep-the-peace Isabella, I gained Renee's fleeting gratitude and attention but lost my Charlie.

In the furore of the police investigation and speculation that followed, the bottom fell out of my life and our parents' marriage. I quietly dropped out of High School and took on more hours at the library to escape the house. Renee retreated into herself and Charles put in longer and longer hours into work and the investigation about his missing daughter.

For never ending, interminably long weeks we waited for news. Each ringing of the door bell was hell. Every mail delivery empty of news; agony. It was like trying to breathe underwater; smothering and pointless. The weeks quickly melted into months.

In the end Charlie was consider to be a runaway and the town gossips dined once again at the Swan family's expense. My Charlie was labelled a foolish, flighty girl like her mother. Who, chafing against the restrictions of living at home, had left and then met the wrong person and had the worst happen. Due to the lack of any evidence of an onward journey or witnesses to her whereabouts, this was taken as the most likely scenario. I never believed any of it, and I hated them all for believing it.

It was true that there was tension between our parents and Charlie. She had Renee's restless character but our father's steadfast stubbornness. She was not a flighty creature like our mother, but the tighter our parents tried to keep her as their child, the more restless and fixated on what she wanted she became. Her behaviour was a part of childhood; the tension caused by a child stretching for adulthood. Normal. That they believe she could have left only showed me they had never known _their_ Charlotte the way I knew _my_ Charlie.

I tried to explain that to our parents and the police, but was never taken seriously. They were more willing to listen to a tearful Alison who told the police that she and Charlie had sneaked out to go to a local bar with Alison's cousin who was on leave from the army. Her story seemed to add creditably to the theory that Charlie might have met someone in the bar. Alison and she had got separated and in the space of half an hour Charlie was lost.

I knew better. She would never have left me. We had plans to leave together. I was why Charlie stayed with our parents passed her eighteenth birthday. We were waiting for me to turn eighteen and then we had plans to go out into the world together. Always together.

My failure to successfully explain _who_ Charlie really was to our parents and the police left me with a creeping sense of numbness inside because of my failure. That numbness left me withdrawn for the reality of what was going on around me. I listened to the conversations and speculations that followed Charlie's disappearance from a distance. As though I was a stranger voyeuristically witnessing somebody else's life being destroyed.

We had a visit from the pastor of a church that Renee had at sometime attended when her shifting attentions had turned to religion. When he'd called me a "brave girl" I'd thought he was speaking to someone else in the room, because I hadn't felt like I was there at all. At least not in spirit.

With the same detachment, I watched Renee's grief fuelled tantrums and Charles's clumsy attempts to soothe her while fighting his own misery. Throughout it all, I was stoic, dependable Isabella who never missed a day at work, or let anyone see her shed a tear. Even if each step I took to move me through the days, weeks and months of Charlie's disappearance made me bleed inside.

The numbness didn't last forever. I woke up to myself on the day that Renee started talking about funerals and marker stones as some undefined future event. When Charles joined the discussion without a murmur of denial, I knew they had both given up. They were willing to bury an empty box in Charlie's name, and move on.

Quietly, without drama, I walked out of the house that afternoon. The slamming of the front door behind me was the only indication of my inner fury. Finally awake to the reality of the unthinkable, I'd walked around town that day and into the night until I was too exhausted to walk anymore.

I came to sort of realisation; fury was better than apathy I had let myself drown in. It might not be hope, but it might give me enough strength to plan and focus on a way forward instead of losing myself in my own despair.

I surprised myself by how cunning I could actually be on my own without Charlie's wicked sense of adventure to pull me along. I began were my parents had given up – with the police investigation. It was easy enough. I volunteered to help out at the Sheriff's Office. I was the Chief's daughter and was trustingly given keys to the filing cabinets and left alone for hours in Charles's office. I used my time well by painstakingly copying out every part of the file on Charlie into note books and pored over every detail they contained, planning what to do next.

I handed in my notice at the library, telling my boss that I was going to work with Charles at the Sheriff's office, and repeated the lie in reverse to our father so I would not be missed there either. I told Renee that I was going to stay with a school friend for the weekend; she didn't bother to ask who. Renee and Charles were barely communicating anymore so I knew it was unlikely that she would think to mention it to him.

I cleared out our savings account and packed a backpack with necessities and a few precious items that I couldn't bear to leave. Our journal, the one in which we'd written down our plans and kept hidden under a floor board in our bedroom. The books that I'd asked for and she'd given me for my 17th birthday.

Before putting the books away, I'd opened one of them to the first page to see the message she'd written.

_ Bella, to inspire you with big thoughts while we're in this little world. Always, Charlie. X_

It wouldn't have meant anything to anyone but us. In fact, one of the Deputies, on finding the book had suggested it showed she might have wanted to leave. They were idiots, and I'd been more careful about keeping my precious things hidden after that.

The book was on the reading list of one of the many college courses I had researched: Plato's _The Symposium_. It contained a translation from the original ancient Greek by one Professor from Berkley and the remaining chapters contained discussion and academic analysis by another Professor of Classical literature also from Berkley. Charlie had teased me about my gift choice for weeks.

I'd earnestly explained it was a philosophical text on the purpose and origins of love written as though discussed in a dramatic dialogue, and excited tried to share my enthusiasm and love of the learning contained within the stiff, navy covers. She'd smiled at my eagerness to share my attraction to book, and listened patiently until I finished and asked her opinion.

Irreverent about the classics as ever, she'd said there were better ways to find out about love than reading the crusty, dusty words of some long dead men, and thrust the copy of _Gone With The Wind_ that she kept borrowing from the library at me. We'd hugged and laughed.

That conversation had inspired my birthday gift to her; her own copy of _Gone With The Wind_ signed by the author Margaret Mitchell. Not an easy item to come by, but with the help of a friend of a friend of my boss at the library who happened to work in publishing, I'd managed it. Of course, I'd never had a chance to see Charlie open her gift.

Charlie' book and mine were the last things packed in my backpack. Placed together and wrapped up carefully inside a sweater for protection, they were two of the most important things I owned in the world.

The third most precious possession, I put on before I left the little two bedroom clapboard house in which we had grown up; a woollen navy coat with a sailor collar and pale blue piping. One of two matching coats that Charlie had had made for us, one of which she'd given to me as my second birthday gift.

As I walked to the bus stop, I knew that this course of action would hurt Charles and Renee, but I had to do this for Charlie and I. I wasn't their little girl anymore and they would get over it, eventually. I wasn't leaving secretly to be cruel. I just could not afford to be swayed from this path because of Renee's pleading and needs or Charles's need to indulge our mother. I'd let that happen once to my cost.

My secrecy was deliberate but with the best intentions. I had left them a letter full of reasons but not the truth. I did my best to throw Charles off of my true direction. I knew the Police Chief, as much as the father in him, would compel him to look for me. I boarded a bus and travelled nearly 100 miles in the wrong direction until the bus route intersected with the bus which Charlie had taken so many months before. In a busy bus station, in a nondescript town were many different bus routes met and divided, I changed buses and disappeared, headed to my true destination, Phoenix.

If I could not find Charlotte alive, I would not return until I had the remains of my beloved sister to lay to rest under the marker stone the Renee had so lovingly been obsessing about, or the story of her ending to lay her ghost to rest within my heart. Until I had one of those outcomes, I would not give up searching.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three – Focus

Many hours later, Phoenix came into view. Sprawled out in front of me were mile upon mile of houses and neighbourhoods set within the dry, Arizona landscape. The bus arrived at the bus station later that afternoon, and I disembarked into the fading light of the late September afternoon. I pulled my coat closer around and flagged a cab to take me to the motel I had researched prior to leaving home. It was half way between Alison's parents' residential neighbourhood and the bar from which Charlie had disappeared. I checked into the motel using my Grandmother's name and dropped off my bag in the basic but clean room.

I didn't linger, deciding instead to take a walk around the neighbourhood that Charlie had been staying in to get a feeling for the place before it got dark. There was nothing sinister about the rows of detached houses, selection of shops or the diner that I stopped in to get something to eat. I wasn't sure what I had been looking for, to be honest. It wasn't as though I was likely to find a sign outside one of the neat little houses saying "kidnapper lives here".

I guess part of me wanted to walk around and see and hear the sights and sounds that Charlie might have experienced. I was looking for some sort of connection, but ended up with a sinking sense of confusion and loss.

Looking down at the half eaten plate of omelette and fries in front of me, I pushed it away, no longer hungry. I gathered my things together and made my way across the black and white tiled floor to the counter to pay. It was getting late, and the diner was only occupied by a few customers. A waitress came over to collect my half full plate from the now empty table and walked off towards the kitchen before she noticed me waiting.

She came behind the counter and put the plate down as she moved over to the till with a small frown on her face. I looked up, trying and failing to make my lips curve into a polite smile as something behind her shoulder caught my eye making me freeze.

"Was everything okay, you didn't seem to eat much?"

With a mouth that seemed suddenly dry as a desert, I made a sort of choking noise in reply.

"Are you okay?" She turned to look at what I was staring at and made a little clucking noise in response.

On the cork board behind the waitress was Charlie's face smiling out of at me from a missing poster. I recognised the picture, it had been taken on the day of my birthday and had originally been of both of us posing in our new coats. The picture had been cropped to remove me, but my hand could still be seen on Charlie's shoulder and the outline of my waist and shoulder was still visible along one of the edges of the picture. I felt suddenly sick with bone deep loneliness.

"Oh, yes that. That's been up for a while now. So sad, pretty girl isn't she? Somebody must be missing her, those posters are all over town."

I forced my focus back to the waitress, weirdly grateful to the woman for referring to Charlie in the present rather than the past tense.

"Yes, very pretty." I wetted my dry lips with my tongue. "What happened exactly?"

The waitress shrugged, her attention focused away from me as she concentrated on pressing buttons on the cash register. "She was visiting from out of town and apparently went out to a local bar and never came home."

"Bar? Was it near here?" I asked, already knowing the answer but interested to see if she could give me some local knowledge.

"Yes, it's out by Route 60. Mahoney's Sports Bar. It's a busy place, gets a lot of the soldiers from the army camp out at Fort Rutledge, out the other side of Scottsdale. It can get rowdy from what I hear but it's not particularly known from trouble. I guess she must have met with the wrong sort." She shrugged again as I extended my hand towards her with some money. My eyes were drawn back to Charlie's smiling face in the picture.

"Who knows, perhaps she met the man of her dreams in uniform and got swept off her feet. Maybe there's a happy ending behind that poster."

"It would be nice, wouldn't it?" I tried to smile and didn't think I was very successful as I waved away the hand that she was extending with my change. I wanted so much for that happy ending to be a possibility. So much that it hurt to think about it, but in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn't possible. Charlie would have contacted me, if she had been able.

"Please keep the change, the food was great. I just wasn't very hungry."

"Thanks, you have a good night now."

"You, too," I said politely before walking towards the door.

I made my way back to the motel on tired legs but with a renewed sense of purpose. I feel asleep on top of the covers of the motel bed re-reading the note books that contained the details of Charlie's police file.

ooOOoo

My morning started with a trip to the Motel reception desk to extend my stay by another night, and a longish walk to Mahoney's Sports Bar. When I arrived to a locked up building, and no sign of life, I called myself every kind of idiot. It wasn't as though I knew much about bars, but even I should have realised that they wouldn't be open this early in the morning.

The bar was on the corner of a busy street made up of shops and offices with a wide paved walk way outside and parking bays to the side and front. The road and buildings formed a square around a small park which offered a manicured patch of green grass and trees, neat flower beds and benches in the middle of the tarmac and brick of the buildings and road which surround it.

Rather than admit to myself that this venture might add up to a wasted morning. I decided to stay in the area, and watch the comings and goings around the bar until it eventually opened. I started by ordering coffee and oatmeal for breakfast in a nearby diner, and later settling myself onto one of the park benches with a newspaper to hide behind.

Nothing much happened for the first couple of hours. People came and went on the sidewalk across the road from my amateurish little stakeout location. Suited and booted office workers and children walking to school. Housewives leaving the Piggly Wiggly with brown paper grocery sacks filled with shopping, and mothers pushing babies in prams. I watched them all from my bench, but nobody seemed to notice me.

It wasn't until mid morning that there was any sign of activity at the bar. A short, stocky man with greying red hair unlocked the front doors and came out onto the sidewalk. He was smartly but practically dressed in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark tie and dark trousers and a black apron. It was likely that he was one of the barmen, perhaps the owner. I had no way to know for sure. I thought back to reading one of Charlie's deputy's reports and the name of the owner, Michael Mahoney, come to mind.

I watched as he went around to the side of the building and opened large, metal doors which were set into the sidewalk at the same time as a brewery truck pulled up to where he was standing. A younger man dressed in army fatigues joined the older man and they both conversed jovially with the truck driver before starting to unload crates of rattling glass bottles from the back of the truck, and kegs of beer. The younger man and the delivery drive seemed to do most of the heavy lifting, while the older man read through some sort of paperwork on a clipboard which he marked from time to time with a pen.

The truck eventually left, and the delivery doors were closed up again. The older man slapped the younger on the shoulder affectionately before heading back into the bar. After rolling his shoulders and stretching out his arms like a runner warming up before a race, the younger man pulled a cloth cap out of his belt. With the hat pulled onto his head, and a quick look at his wrist watch, he set off down the sidewalk purposefully.

I continued to watch until the bar began to fill up as early afternoon turned into mid afternoon. What the diner waitress had told me yesterday seemed to be true. The bar seemed to be popular. The people entering the building were mostly men, though not exclusively, and many were in uniform.

When there appeared to be enough people coming and going to make me think I might be able to blend into the crowd, I got up from my bench and headed across the road.

I wasn't sure what I to expect when I entered the building in the middle of what I assumed must be a lunch time rush. Moving from the brightness outside into the dimly lit interior of the bar required a moment of adjustment for my eyes. The bar was large, set below street level, and there were steps down into a large space who's main feature was an oval shaped bar made of dark, highly polished wood. A mismatched collection of wooden tables and chairs were scattered around the floor and booths were lined up around the outside walls.

The walls were painted brick, dark red in colour and decorated with a selection of sports memorabilia and posters about different types of beer and brands of cigarettes. People were either arranged around the bar nursing drinks, talking and laugh, or sitting at the booths and tables eating.

A curtain framed archway lead off to another room from which the sound of loud conversation and active pool games could be heard. A large radio was placed near the bar from which a commentator was excitedly narrating the progress of a baseball game.

It was a dark, smoky sort of place, full of animated conversation, loud laughing voices and bustling activity.

Shifting nervously from one foot to another, I realised something. Other than a couple of waitresses moving around, I was almost the only female customer in the place; the others being a group of three women in uniform who were sat laughing and eating at a table to my left. From the badge on the shoulder of one of them, I guessed they might be nurses.

In my neat but utilitarian navy suit, without makeup and my hair rolled and pinned at the back of my head I look very out of place beside the pretty and colourfully dressed waitresses. I looked more suited to the afternoon crowd of secretaries at the diner downs the street, than this very male orientated environment.

It wasn't quite the movie moment when the beautiful, young ingénue walks into a crowd place and awkward silence follows, but I could see that I was drawing a few speculative looks. Though I was young, I would never have called myself beautiful, so the reason for the looks was very likely to be more about my awkwardness than my appeal to the opposite sex. Either way, I clearly was failing to blend with the crowd.

Forcing my reluctant feet to move, I approached a quiet spot at the bar and waited with less than one clue about what I would do if somebody actually bothered to speak to me.

The older man that I had observed that morning was standing behind the bar wiping the surface with a towel while laughing and talking to a group of customers who were standing at the bar close to the radio. He looked up and caught my eye. Being a moron, I looked off in the opposite direction blushing. I must have screamed guilty conscience and might as well have had a sign hanging around my neck saying as much.

Giving myself a mental slap, I looked back towards him and tried to smile winningly. He slung the towel over his shoulder and walked toward my end of the bar.

"What can I get you?"

I went blank. _Shit. _I was going to say Cola, but a look to my right towards the nurses had me requesting the drink that they all had in front of them.

"Beer." I tried for another smile. "Please."

He cross her arms across his chest and looked at me with a challenge on his face before rattling off words that I didn't understand. I felt my face begin to flush even warmer. This was just going from bad to worse.

I repeated back one of the names randomly to him.

"Tap or bottle?"

"Bottle?"

He mouth curved in a sort of sarcastic smile and he turned his back to get the drink. When a filled glass was put down in front of me I lifted it quickly to my lips. The taste of ginger beer filled my mouth and his smile widened. I was so busted.

He pulled a newspaper out from under the bar, laid it down on the surface and drew a pencil from behind his ear. He slipped some half-moon style reading glass onto his nose before he began calmly to complete a crossword.

"So, want to tell me why a pretty young thing like you has been hanging about outside my bar all morning?"

My face was so red by now that it could have been used to heat the room.

He didn't even bother to look up from his puzzle as he filled in "platoon", as the answer to an anagram of "top loan". I watched him fill the boxes with neat, grey block capitals as the pencil scratched against the paper, completely unable to think of anything to say in reply.

He pushed the glass of ginger ale towards me without looking up. Taking it as a reprieve, I gulped down a mouthful of the sugary drink and tried to remember how to breathe.

"Are you trying to follow your boyfriend, maybe?" His voice wasn't unkind.

"I'm sorry, I really didn't mean any harm."

"Do you have a crush on one of these soldier boys from the Fort, hmm?"

I tried to unscramble my brain to think of what Charlie might have done and was coming up blank.

"It nothing like that. I-ehh..."

He looked at me over the top of his glasses, his expression sceptical.

Guiltily, my eyes dropped from his gaze and down to the crossword, I scanned one of the clues while stalling for a suitable excuse because "I was staking out your bar" really wasn't going to work as an answer.

The answer, to the crossword question – not my current predicament– came to me easily. One of the benefits of being a keen reader. A rapid case of nervous word vomit, had me blurting out the answer without thinking first.

"Steadfast!"

He quirked a grey eyebrow at me. I pointed a not altogether steady finger at the newspaper.

"Not likely to wobble the slow. Five Down. Steadfast."

Light blue eyes met me over the top of his glasses again. I had to stop myself from squirming. His expression reminded me of our former Head Teacher, and the way he would silently stare whenever I had been pulled in front of him with Charlie after one of our misadventures. Charlie was the cool under pressure one of us, I was more of a choke out a confession sort of girl.

He straighten up, and looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on the over full backpack that I had at my feet. I realised what it looked like. I was an idiot, what sort of woman brought anything other than a handbag to a bar. The bag held all my worldly goods. I hadn't thought it a good idea to leave it at the hotel. I'd be lucky if he didn't report me to the police as the underage runaway that I was.

"Are you in some sort of trouble?"

"No, I was just in the area. I'm...relocating from...Sedona...for family reasons," I muttered unconvincingly, giving the name of a town fifty miles in the opposite direction from my real home.

"Do you have somewhere to stay?"

"Of course."

He watched me for several seconds, and I tried to hold his gaze without flinching. When he refocused his attention onto his crossword again, I let out an unsteady breath.

"Twelve across, descriptively deceptive truth, ten letters." He tapped the pencil against his lips, then looked up at me again.

"Dishonestly," I replied, desperately wishing that my hair was not pinned tightly to my head so that I could hide behind it like I would when I was a child. He calmly wrote the word in the same neat, precise block capitals.

I felt tears well up in my eyes. He had me. I knew it, he knew it...

_Charlie, I'm so sorry. I haven't even started, and I've already failed you._

"Twenty three down, antonym of twelve across, eight letters." He was looking at me again.

"Honestly," I whispered.

He folded the newspaper in half it replaced it back under the bar, and the pencil was tucked back behind his ear. Our conversation was over apparently. I looked down at my fingers which were gripping the edge of the bar so tight that my finger nails were white.

I made myself let go, and look up at him, submitting to my fate .

"So you're here about a job?" he asked.

I stared at him wide-eyed, rabbit in the headlights style.

"Yes?" Filled with uncertainty, I made my answer a question.

"I've got to say, you look more like a librarian than a waitress, girlie."

It was a fair comment and ironically accurate. Charlie would love that, but here in the moment, I found it more difficult to appreciate the potential humour. I grimace as I looked down at my navy skirt and sensible shoes. I had nothing to losing, and everything to gain by being pushy. Straightening up, I looked at him squarely.

"I know, but it doesn't mean that I'm not a hard or reliable worker. If it helps, I can cook."

"It's not your skills in the kitchen I'm worried about; it's your ability to handle that lot." He nodded towards the noise and bustle of the crowd as he stood with his arms crossed across his chest.

"I can handle myself," I blustered.

"Fine. Come back tonight, at eight thirty. Dress pretty, but nothing skimpy or immodest. This is a respectable establishment and I expect that kind of behaviour from my staff. The guys that come here might look, but touching is not tolerated. I can promise you that much.

"My names Michael Mahoney, you can call me Mr Mahoney, I'm the owner." He held his hand out to be shaked, and I returned the gesture, making sure that my grip was firm.

"And you are?"

"Isabell–ah...I mean... Isabel Marie Reynolds. Sorry, I don't really use my first name, everyone calls me Marie."

He looked sceptical. I didn't blame him, as slick liars went, I was an abysmal failure.

"Thank you, Mr Mahoney, for the opportunity."

He laughed. "We'll see if you still think of it that way after tonight. You may not realise it, but I'm throwing you in at the deep end. Nights in here can get crazy.

"I won't let you down."

"We'll see, Girlie. Besides, it's been a while since I had somebody to finish the crossword for me. Remember eight thirty, dress pretty."

I turned and walked out. Before I knew it, I found myself blinking owlishly in the afternoon sunshine as though the last few minutes had never happened. It was surreal.

I gather my scatter wits together. I had some shopping to do in a hurry. Something pretty but not whorish. I could pull that off – I think. I turned and walked briskly towards the bus stop. I needed to travel into town and find a department store.

Sitting on the bus as it drove into the centre of the city, I pulled our journal out of my bag and opening it to the photograph of Charlie and I, wearing our birthday coats, arm in arm. I traced the outline of Charlie's smiling face with my finger.

_I'm trying to get closer, Charlie, I promise._


End file.
